Pobox’s spam filter bounced something purporting to be from Arturo Fuente <yoichi@t-online.de> – someone with a Spanish name and a Japanese handle, posting from Germany? Not impossible, of course.
(Russell advises me that Arturo Fuente is a brand of cigar. Do they grow tobacco in Perú?)
All About Eve (1950) contains a brief scene of Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) walking along a back-projected street, something I’ve rarely seen. I wonder why it was done. — Ah, on second thought: The street appears to be a real one in Connecticut, and back-projection was easier than taking the actors there (from Hollywood) for one shot.
In two months and a bit since opening comments, this blog received just eight, of which half were mere applause; and Blogger makes handling comments a bit of a nuisance. So I’ve turned commenting back off; and incorporated the four substantive comments as addenda to the original posts, which is what I do anyway when someone bothers to write to me.
Can you tell that I’m grouchy today?
Later: One friend takes the above as a complaint – he did not use the word whine – about your collective failure to provide more comments. Please set your minds at ease! I opened comments only because that same friend remarked cattily two or three times on their absence; on closing them I felt a duty to announce and explain the end of the experiment.
Civil disobedience at its finest (cited by Bill St Clair, who got it from Claire Wolfe)
I’ve now seen Rashômon twice, about twenty years apart, and still can’t see what’s so great about it.
My housemate asked: “Is there a Japanese School of Overacting?”
November: And who can translate the title for me? The frame story takes place in a ruined monumental gate on which a sign of three characters can be seen; the third is mon ‘gate’, so presumably Rashômon is the name of the place. One of the other kanji — I’ve now forgotten which — means ‘life’ or (as on Asahi beer labels) ‘fresh’. I couldn’t make out the third.
I dreamed that Ed Pegg had closed down Mathpuzzle and moved to the Balkans. (Whew.)